I don't really get Laravel. The docs talk about dependency injection but at the same time they really really love static function calls. For example there's no event manager class, only a single, global event manager: e.g. "Event::fire('loaded')".

What if I want to use a different event manager? (To pass event calls across the network, for example.) There doesn't seem to be any way to do this, and pretty much all the core classes are like this.

http://laravel.com/docs/events

yesss, laravel is the most promising of all. few weeks ago, i wanted to make small site in php, i evaluated nette (poor docs, bugs), silex (couldn't get autoloading to work on shared host) and finaly laravel - by far best! especialy eloquent orm is simple yet very usable AR impl, all api's very simple and clean - this fw has very railsy feeling overall. there is laravel 4 behind the doors, i was playing little bit with it, it's even better (copy of rails :-)) - autor claims full DI support so testing should be simple...

L4 https://github.com/illuminate/app

Indeed. Laravel (especially the upcoming version 4) is the best thing that happened to the PHP community in a while!

Laravel is my first experience with php frameworks.

I have yet to actually finish a project in it which is disappointing (for something whose entire purpose is to make finishing projects faster) but I really like it. It's been a huge educational experience for me.